From the mini-site linked in the post below:
The browser’s address bar is never used. For instance, to go to Playboy’s site, you don’t type “www.playboy.com”; instead, in the “search field” in your start page (probably MSN search), you type “Playboy”. You do that every time you go there.
Some time ago, I read some article which mentioned, among other things, that the top (non-sex) search terms in search engines were stuff like “yahoo” or “ebay”. At the time, it came as a surprise, because I had never really thought about it.
It’s one thing to search for “auctions” and get Ebay as a result. It’s quite another thing to actually search for the name of the site, and click on the first result, instead of simply typing “www.ebay.com”. And to think that most people do it… it was a bit of a shock.
I never had much use for browser “home pages”, or “start pages”; usually, the first thing I do in a new computer is to change it to a blank page (except for my home PC, which I point to Wikipedia’s Special:RandomPage - learning is good. :)). But, apparently, most people do use them, and never change them in their lives.
Now, what are the default search pages in the 2 most popular browsers? For IE, it’s MSN Search; for Firefox it’s Google.
See why Google invests so much in Firefox, both in terms of money, and of actually hiring developers to work full-time on it? Firefox makes a lot of money to Google (after all, there be ads in the search results)… and to the Mozilla Foundation, as well.
Nothing wrong with it, of course. But it’s interesting to think of these things.
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I type URLs all the time; sometimes I leave off the http://www. My wife types full URLs all the time, including the http:// and everything. Are we so strange?
The “http://” isn’t needed these days. But typing URLs is normal, I think - I do it too (and also use bookmarks, and del.icio.us). What I find strange is to search for “ebay” to instead of typing http://www.ebay.com... but, apparently, most people do it. Weird.
I, for one, am a keyboard shortcut addict:
google + [Ctrl+Enter] = http://www.google.com
internic + [Shift+Enter] = http://www.internic.net
slashdot + [Ctrl+Shift+Enter] = http://www.slashdot.org
I used to always use Ctrl+Enter on IE and it’s the ONLY thing I miss in Opera…
I’ll work out how to make Opera do it when i find some free time
Another interesting thing is that in Opera, if you do any searching through the address bar (just typing or by using the search engine specifiers [eg: g test = search google for test and a test searches answers.com for test]) this uses the Opera forwarded version of those search engines…
They must make quite a bit of money from all that.
—–
Peter
http://peteremcc.wordpress.com